Tag Archives: market pricing

How To Make Chocolate | Lucky Peach

Leave a reply

It’s easy to forget that chocolate is a fruit. It’s born on a tree and undergoes several steps that transform the bitter, astringent seed into the rich, flavorful bars that we know.

Let’s take a little time to ponder the botanical story of chocolate and retrace the journey from its tropical origin. The cacao tree (officially, Theobroma cacao; theobroma translates as “food of the gods”), was classified in 1753 by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus. The most recent genetic research points to the upper Amazon rainforests of South America—near present-day Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru—as its origin. It grows only within a narrow latitudinal band, between 20˚N and 20˚S of the equator. From its origins in South and Central America, cacao cultivation now spans the circumference of the globe within its tropical range. West African countries, namely Ghana and the Ivory Coast, currently provide about 70 percent of the world’s cocoa supply.

The cacao tree is fairly small, commercially bred to grow roughly 9 to 12 feet high. Like grape vines, cacao must often reach six to seven years maturity before producing a full yield of fruit. Its fruit, the cacao pod, develops from flowers that blossom directly from the trunk and thicker branches of the tree, reaching maturity in five to six months (thus sometimes allowing for two harvests per year). Each individual bean is comprised of an outer shell, the germ, and the nib. Conveniently, one pod’s worth of beans produces a 100-gram bar of chocolate.

via How To Make Chocolate | Lucky Peach.

 

When You’re Eating Chilean Sea Bass, You’re Actually Eating Patagonian Toothfish

Leave a reply

 

Have you ever heard of Patagonian toothfish? Well, chances are, you’ve eaten it — only when you ate it, it was called Chilean Seabass.

Yes, that’s right, Chilean Seabass is just a more “friendly” name for the Patagonian toothfish. The name under which it’s marketed was changed in 1977 by fisherman Lee Lantz , to make it sound more appetizing to the American market. Although the fish isn’t always caught in Chilean waters, and a toothfish isn’t technically even a bass, the term Chilean Seabass had “broad resonance among American seafood eaters.”

While the name change has certainly helped the Patagonian toothfish become more popular (there was a major Chilean Seabass boom in the ’90s), it has also led to overfishing of the species. Without strict government regulation, sustainability hasn’t been a top priority and many fishermen have been fishing in areas where they shouldn’t be. Had this fish not been renamed to make it more marketable, would the demand have been as high and led to overfishing? Probably not.

It may seem odd that a fish’s name was changed to make it sound better, however it is actually more common than you may think. Monkfish was originally called Goosefish, Sea Urchin used to be called Whore’s Eggs and Orange Roughy was Slimehead.

via When You’re Eating Chilean Sea Bass, You’re Actually Eating Patagonian Toothfish.

EDIBLE FLOWERS becoming more available and sought after

Leave a reply

From our friend across the “pond”

In Issue Nº6 we are celebrating the ingredient EDIBLE FLOWERS. We meet the wonderful Jan Billington, an organic flower farmer in Devon who believes that edible flowers should not just as a pretty addition on the side of a plate. The lovely Johanna Paget, communications manager at the Soil Association will be popping by to explain the importance of good/organic/healthy soil. The talented Matthew Mason, Head Chef at The Jack in the Green, talks about his love for good local ingredients and shares a couple of incredibly tasty summer dishes. Plus, barbecue expert Marcus Bawdon will be showing us how to cook up some tasty wood-fired recipes. We take a look at the Kitchen Table Projects, a brilliant new London-based initiative that is passionate about helping artisan food producers get their product out there. All this on top of the usual good stuff you’ve come to expect!

READ ISSUE NÂş6: groweatgather.co.uk/

via EDIBLE FLOWERS on Vimeo.

 

Where to Find the Best Celery in the World | Lucky Peach

Leave a reply

I was first clued in to the funny relationship some chefs have with celery a decade or so ago, when I worked for a summer at Chanterelle, the long-running and now-departed restaurant of David Waltuck. While there was certainly celery in the kitchen, Waltuck banished it from his stocks and braises—it was an outcast, an unacceptable aromatic. In The French Laundry Cookbook, Thomas Keller notes that he doesn’t use celery in stocks either, citing its bitterness. And Jacques Pepin has talked about being clonked over his jeune tete with a head of celery during his apprenticeship. (Or was that George Orwell while he was down and out in Paris and London?)

Either way, I think these guys may just have never met the right celery—that, of course, being the bleached celery of Lancaster County, PA. Unlike the stringent, vegetal stuff you find wilting in crisper drawers across America, Lancaster celery is feathery, delicate, and pale yellow—so sweet, so nutty, so tender that common celery pales in comparison. It is shorter and smaller than supermarket celery, and more or less string-free.

via Where to Find the Best Celery in the World | Lucky Peach.

I Think I Cran | Lucky Peach

Leave a reply

starvation-alley-web

Jessika Tantisook of Starvation Alley Farms knows the image everyone has of cranberry farming. “Yes,” she laughs, when I ask about the Ocean Spray ads featuring guys in waders submerged to their chests, surrounded by floating berries. “It’s just like that.” For a few weeks each year, anyway.

In 2010, Tantisook and her partner, Jared Oakes, moved to Washington to take over ten acres of cranberry bogs from Oakes’s parents. They decided to turn it into the state’s first organic cranberry farm—despite all expert advice to the contrary.

Five years in, the farm is now certified organic. They produce their own raw, unsweetened cranberry juice, which has found devoted customers among health-seekers, craft-cocktail connoisseurs, and farmers’ market shoppers alike. And the pair is working with neighboring farms to help them make the same transition to organic. Tantisook estimates there are fewer than twelve organic cranberry farms in the country, totaling three hundred acres—compared with about forty thousand acres of cranberries grown nationally.

via I Think I Cran | Lucky Peach.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Asparagus* | Lucky Peach

Leave a reply

IN THE FIELD

It’s a spring afternoon in the middle of asparagus season, and I’m crouching in a field with Jim Durst, an organic farmer in California’s Yolo County, northwest of Sacramento. Here and there green spears poke upward through the dirt. These asparagus will be picked tomorrow; they can grow whole inches overnight. “It looks totally different in the morning,” Jim tells me. “It looks like a little forest of trees, sticking up. And after they harvest, it looks like somebody logged it.”

Asparagus is a member of the lily family, so it has very extensive root systems. It grows mostly along waterways. The roots can go down about anywhere from twelve to twenty feet.

The warmer soil temperature stimulates growth, so as soon as it warms up in the spring, the spears start to emerge. We harvest every day, because the spears can grow two to three inches a day. The spear is actually a branch trying to get up and get going. Once you cut a spear off, the plant sends up another shoot. So harvesting stimulates production—it keeps it going. During the harvest time, we are cutting the field every day. We harvest particularly spears of a certain height, ’cause that’s what we put in our box. The market determines that to be nine and a half inches.

via Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Asparagus* | Lucky Peach.

This Video Explains How So Much Food Gets Wasted In America

Leave a reply

There’s a certain school of thought about sustainability that argues that the worst problem in the food system today is waste. The idea is that we expend a tremendous amount of resources — water, gasoline, fertilizer, pesticides, labor — growing food that never actually feeds anyone. Food waste advocates also argue that the world’s farms already produce enough food to end hunger for good, if only the food that’s currently thrown out could make it to the dinner plates of those in need.

The most obvious source of food waste is in the home. Who, after all, hasn’t had the experience of buying five or six bags of groceries at the supermarket, only to end up throwing out a good portion when it spoils before you have a chance to eat it?

via This Video Explains How So Much Food Gets Wasted In America.

What Is Quinoa? A Breakdown For Those Of Us Who Eat It But Don’t Truly Understand It

1 Reply

QUINOA

Second only to maybe kale, quinoa is the health food star of our time. The Food and Agriculture Organization named 2013 the International Year of Quinoa, after all. This tiny grain-like food is full of good-for-you nutrition and tastes great in just about anything: salads, omelettes and even cakes.

We’re willing to bet you’ve eaten a good deal of the stuff, but do you know what it really is? It’s okay if you don’t, because not many of us do. Today’s the day we change that with a few fun facts and photos that tell us about where quinoa comes from.

Here are 8 important things everyone should know about quinoa:

via What Is Quinoa? A Breakdown For Those Of Us Who Eat It But Don’t Truly Understand It.

 

quinoa

The Jolly (Micro) Green Giant | Lucky Peach

Leave a reply

It’s a sunny day at Windfall Farms in upstate New York, and Morse Pitts, the owner, is trying to explain to me one of the many reasons his microgreens cost so damn much: anywhere from sixteen to sixty-four dollars for a quarter pound, which barely enough to fill a bowl. But he tells me that’s still far from breaking even.

First off: every shoot sold comes from a single seed. A sunflower shoot takes up to three weeks to mature. New seeds are planted twice a week for the duration of winter—which, this past year, lasted four and a half months. To keep their stand at the Union Square Greenmarket sticked they had to plant over 750 pounds of sunflower seeds (at $185 per 50-pound bag)—and that’s one of the dozen-plus microgreens they sell. They also grow micro mesclun, mustard, pea greens, sunflower shoots, amaranth, buckwheat, Hong Vit radish, arugula, and an assortment of edible flowers. The flavor of these greens is intense (also, they’re cute), and they’re considered the gold standard by many New York chefs. But the real reason Pitts grows them is so that his dozen or so workers have something to do in the slow months.

via The Jolly (Micro) Green Giant | Lucky Peach.

microgreenfarmer